♂William d'Aubigny

William d’Aubigny (died 12 October 1176) was a Norman lord of Buckenham in Norfolk who married the widowed queen of King Henry I, and through the castle she brought him came to be known as Earl of Arundel. He was the twenty-fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Alice d’Aubigny.

The queen’s husband

William was the son and heir of William d’Aubigny of Buckenham (died 1139), the king’s butler^W, and of Maud, the daughter of Roger le Bigod. The family took its name from Aubigny, near Coutances in Normandy, and his father had crossed to England in the reign of Henry I, early in which William was born. He was nicknamed “the strong hand”. A later legend told that at Bourges in 1137 he had torn out the tongue of a lion let loose on him by the Queen Dowager of France, whom he had rejected for her namesake in England.

In 1138, the third year of her widowhood, Adelise of Louvain married William d’Aubigny, and with her came the castle and honor of Arundel in Sussex, which had been settled on her in dower. In 1139 William gave shelter at Arundel Castle to the Empress Maud^W, Henry I’s daughter and Adelise’s stepdaughter, though he held to King Stephen ever after.

Earl under two kings

His earldom took several names. About 1139 he was recognized as Earl of Lincoln, but he soon lost that title, and from 1141 he was styled Earl of Sussex; his own later charters, and a charter that Adelise gave to Reading Abbey^W before 1150, call him Earl of Chichester. He helped to arrange the treaty of 1153^W, which left the crown with Stephen for life and secured the inheritance to Henry II, and he signed it as “Comes Cicestrie”. About 1155 Henry II confirmed to him, as William, Earl of Arundel, the castle and the whole honor of Arundel, with the third penny of the pleas of Sussex.

Henry II held him in great esteem. William went on the king’s embassy to Rome in 1163/4 and to Saxony in 1168, when the king’s daughter was betrothed to the Duke of Saxony. In August 1173, during the revolt of the king’s sons^W, he commanded the royal army in Normandy and was praised for his “swiftness and velocity”, and on 29 September he helped to defeat the Earl of Leicester and his Flemings near Bury St Edmunds. His own grandson and ward, the young Count Henry of Eu, had gone over to the rebels.

In 1150 Adelise retired to a nunnery at Afflighem, in South Brabant, where she died and was buried on 23 April 1151, aged about 48. William survived her by 25 years. He died on 12 October 1176 at Waverley Abbey^W in Surrey and was buried beside his father at Wymondham Priory^W in Norfolk.

The family

The couple’s children included William, the earl’s son and heir; Godfrey; and Alice, who became Countess of Eu. William was confirmed as Earl of Sussex in 1176 or 1177, but under Henry II’s policy the castle and honor of Arundel were kept by the Crown until Richard I granted them back to him after his coronation in 1189.

Notes

Sources

William’s parentage, nickname, marriage, titles, embassies, part in the war of 1173, death and burial are given in the Complete Peerage (2nd edition, vol. 1, 1910, under Arundel, pp. 233–235), which draws on J. H. Round’s Geoffrey de Mandeville, the royal charters and the Annals of Waverley, where his death is recorded under the name Earl of Arundel. The Complete Peerage names no other wife than Adelise. The son Godfrey and the daughter Alice are named in Alice’s charters to Robertsbridge Abbey (Complete Peerage, 2nd edition, vol. 5, 1926, under Eu, p. 157); the young Count Henry of Eu’s wardship and his part in the rising of 1173 are on the same pages.

The lion

The Complete Peerage gives the story of the lion as a legend, told as fact by Brooke and mocked by Vincent, in his Errors of Brooke, as the tale of the “Lye-on”, and suggests that the legend was more probably suggested by the nickname than the source of it.

The earldom

A chronicle of about his own time shows that William did not become Earl of Arundel until some time after his marriage, so that the title did not come to him with the castle. The Lords’ committees on the dignity of a peer doubted whether his family ever held the earldom of Arundel as a title of dignity, though historians and contemporary writers constantly style them Earls of Arundel.

The descent through John Washburn

The line from William to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs through his daughter Alice and her descendants to John Washburn of Bengeworth, who died in 1547. That the John Washburn of the pedigrees was this man is the identification of the Washbournes’ historian, James Davenport, not a record’s, so the descent through him is probable.